TOW #22 (written text)- "Flight 370: When Facts are Few, Imaginations Run Wild"

            Two long weeks ago, an 80-foot long Boeing 777 airplane carrying 227 passengers and 12 crewmembers mysteriously vanished while flying 30,000 feet above the Indian Ocean. On March 8, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took over from Kuala Lumpur Airport in Malaysia heading to Beijing, China. Several hours after takeoff, all communications were cut off with the aircraft as it left Malaysian airspace out over the Indian Ocean. Ever since then, flight 370 has not been seen on radar and seems to have disappeared. For the last two weeks, over a dozen countries have joined in a massive search for the missing aircraft and to this point, nothing has been found. Due to the mysterious nature of the incident, many conspiracy theories have arisen that are offered up in this article by Ann O’Neill with the use of a speculative tone and exemplification.

            When introducing the multiple different conspiracy theories regarding flight 370, O’Neill comes off as satirical, but in reality she is using a more speculative tone. Since the theories are not necessarily based on fact, there is no way that O’Neill can say for sure that one theory is more true than another. In a way, her speculation is the reason this article effective achieves its purpose, which is not really to release information, but to suggest certain theories that may seem wild and unlikely, but may, in fact, be true considering very little is known about flight 370’s disappearance. In addition, O’Neill effectively accomplished this purpose because she provides examples of past incidents to support the different theories. For example, in the “shoot-down theory,” O’Neill proposes that flight 370 was shot down by with missiles because the plane had an electronic failure and was flying unidentified in another country’s airspace. This may seem improbable, but O’Neill points out that this has happened twice in the past 30 years; once in 1988 when the US Navy shot down an Iranian plane that they mistook for a fighter jet, and again in 1983 when Russia shot down a Korean Airlines Flight. With such evidence, this theory, which once seemed irrational, may very well be true if such an electrical failure took place onboard flight 370.

            Overall, Ann O’Neill’s article introducing flight 370 conspiracy theories is effective because if her speculative tone and usage of supporting historical examples.